Pages

unsettled account/p4

This is all leading up to a certain moment, we were in a cafeteria where they served the worst breakfast in the world. Austrian gourmet cooking finally taking its place before Irish cuisine in the world's most bland culinary contributions. I don't remember the pretense, it might have been after a particularly lengthy investigation into vampire signs that signified that behind the veils of mystery there was only a fiancee, a fiancee who was as interesting as the food in front of us. Your sleepy eyes were tall in the room, carried by your sleepy body and the way we said hello, it said hello, it said hello, and made a canal for its echo.

A year later I'm in Berlin at a table with the Boricua contingency, smoking elegantly and talking about revolution, so it would be in the air when you arrived, sleepy from the airport, I remembered your eyes from that other moment, and decided that the geographies of my heart were endless roads in all directions, and opened up when there were spaces for these echoes. Because it happened twice, it was supposed to happen in time, and because it was supposed to happen in time, I thought that maybe it could happen to us. I talked about you in a musician's flat in Kreuzberg, and wondered about how threads might work, and I couldn't see any connections, but held the possibly maybes under my tongue, and sucked my tongue with thoughts of you. I didn't yet understand the mysteries of saliva, because I was so young back then, a wide-eyed boy of 41 years with nothing but a dream. The threads in Kreuzberg did unwind in our direction, smiling on the hips of a river goddess, and still wouldn't reveal all their complicated configurations 17 months later, in a room full of Oshun's, and a child of Oya outside the door who would haunt me in all the right ways for a long time after her feet left the bed (this is really just a complicated way of saying: it's ok to walk on my bed).

That dream of you lasted for only a few nights, and played out for a hundred days, and I looked for you in places where I could never find you. But I found a golden chord one night in the middle of a moment that could turn into art. I followed gypsy longings into that cave.

There's a lot of caves in this story.

The caves opened up to caves behind the caves, like they always do, and every cave has its own dream of water and the end of the world. In these dark nights, punctuated by no heat and a lack of a blanket that was not also a dog, the dead came speaking, and when they came speaking to me, they told me to clear out my accounts, because something was coming that would tear me to pieces in all the right ways, and I listened.

(Sequence out of time: sometime in the future, there's a particularly twitching night, where I'm sleeping in too much light and not sleeping, and wondering about all the people coming into the room next to my room full of ghosts, and I keep wondering if you're going to slip in between them, and crawl to my door with an expression on your face that I won't understand, and I'm decided that I'm not going to open up these wounds for you, but I'd only hold you for a long time, and we'd promise not to say a word about the other things that we didn't say, that other people were apparently trying to say for us, and I know those things weren't true, the things they said I said, and said you said, and how we were supposed to deal with that, because it was so important to them, but we wouldn't speak of it, and I wouldn't let you in, only hold you, I was decided, and you were camping, and this would unnerve me because it meant that everything that was true before was still true, and it would be exhausting but I would see your soul in a coffee cup and wish you could see it, and you did. This is already way too far in the future, though, and hasn't been mulled nearly enough, it needs at least a day, maybe even two if I can be patient; maybe this is all about teaching a wild horse to rest).

It wouldn't make sense a year ago or more that the dead are the ones who open up the pathways for life to continue, but today it makes sense, or at least, if it doesn't make sense, I know it's true. There have been more than enough nights spent smoking cigars under the moon to know that the bottom of the sea is inhabited, and there are very few among the living who can catch a glimpse, and they only get there by riding on the backs of the dead. My ancestors are my whales, and those clicks on the sides of wooden boxes are their songs. Sometimes they are as frustrated as I am that we can't sleep with each other, and for this, they seem peculiarly capable of throwing people into my life to take their place, people that have the gift of second sight, and more than a little bit of knowledge of what to do with the fire that burns below the belly.

In this way, then, that year was cleared, and I was told that I only had one responsibility, to remember everything, and one action, to make grave errors of judgement that would lead to the story that could write itself on the channels of my heart. It would hurt, but I would not die, and if I decided not to hurt, then I would certainly die, so it was without any hesitation that I walked into the next year, no songs on my lips, nothing on my lips but the foam from a train station somewhere in the middle of east Berlin, where we still walk among the figures of the dead, close enough to Eastern Europe to wake up my blood, and still closer to Latin America, where I fall in love with people to fall in love with its unwinding history.

This next section is a lot like a bell, so much so that you could even say that it is a bell.